Round Ireland in Low Gear (19 page)

It was an impressive place. To the left a thick mist enveloped the sides of Knockastumpa and Knockowen, down which we had freewheeled from the Healy Pass, and below them were stonewalled fields filled with cattle and a scattering of white farmhouses. Around me on the lake shore were large rocks, expanses of brown, soft ribbon-like grass, birch trees with branches the colour of red wine, and clumps of rhododendrons and holly, the leaves of which a number of cattle were tucking into as if they were some kind of delicacy and not a short cut to a post-mortem examination. The air was full of the sounds of running water and of birds, some of which to my untutored ear sounded like ‘weet wee’, ‘queou queou’ and ‘peopeep’. There was also an unseasonal abundance of gnats.

Across the lake to the west the steep cliffs of Lackabane fell to the shore, populated by tall clumps of pines, their boles free of branches which added to their stature, and by rhododendrons which flourished among the rocks. It was more like a cliff in Kwantung Province than in County Kerry. For the next couple of miles or so the road followed the Glanmore, which either hurried
down over stones or drifted slowly through deep, peaty pools. I saw a good salmon lying under Glanmore Bridge, facing upstream. The glen was very narrow now and steep-sided, with long waterfalls pouring down into it from the upper parts of Claddaghgarriff, the mountain to the east of the Healy Pass. The last house was a farm high up at the end of the road in a big cirque of mountains dotted with innumerable sheep – Derryclancy, Hungry Hill, Knocknagree and Eskatarriff. Behind this building a series of falls, spectacular now that they were in spate, poured down the rocky flanks of the various peaks to make the Glanmore, even here, a roaring torrent.

On the way down from the falls I met the farmer, who had just arrived in a taxi, presumably not having a motor car. His name was Florence O’Sullivan. His wife was dead but he had two sons and two dogs to help him, a collie and a fox terrier. He said he enjoyed the TV programme
One Man and His Dog
, which is all about sheep dog trials in Britain, and is immensely popular, but added without any suggestion of showing off, ‘It’s a bit different here, a bit more up and down as you might say.’ When I asked him the name of this place, he said he called it ‘The Pocket’, which seemed appropriate. However, the map showed another ‘Pocket’, this one up another glen immediately to the north of where we were, the Drimmin, standing in a similar cirque of mountains, two of which, Eskatarriff and Lackabane, it shared with Glanmore.

This valley, to visit which involved cycling almost all the way down to the shop at Lauragh and then climbing up again, proved to be a graveyard of defunct motor vehicles, in spite of its magnificence. The road up it expired by a farmhouse, beyond which a track of exceptional squelchiness led away in the direction of a steep, rocky prominence, with the narrow gorge of the Drimmin to the right and to the left the way up to a small pass between the Eskatarriff and Coomacloghane mountains.

I was in a place called Cumeengadhra, although I did not know it at the time. This was the land, in the 1800s, of a family named Sullivan Rabach, and it was here that a sailor, a fugitive from a ship in Berehaven, was murdered while spending the night in their farmhouse. His throat was cut, with the connivance of the rest of the family, by the elder son, Cornelius, as they suspected that he had money on him. Their neighbours and joint tenants were the Sullivans Caoch who, like the Sullivans Rabach, were buttermakers, and that evening Maire Caoch, the wife, happened to look in through the Rabachs’ gable window and saw the body. She told her husband and he warned her never to mention the matter again as his sister was the mother of Cornelius and it would certainly lead to trouble. He died soon afterwards. From this time onwards the widow ceased to enjoy, if she ever had enjoyed, a good relationship with the Rabachs and eventually, goaded beyond endurance by various disputes with them, she rather unwisely allowed Cornelius to know that she knew about the murder. One morning in June 1814 he followed her up to the upper grazing ground, where she had gone to milk the cows, and there, with a milk can still in her hand, thirteen years after the original murder, he strangled her.

There was, however, even in this remotest of remote spots, a witness: Daniel Sullivan, aged about twenty, who made his living by cutting off cows’ tails and selling them for twisting into rope. He witnessed the deed from the top of a cliff, but being in his own words ‘not a stout fellow’ he kept quiet and subsequently moved away from the area.

Sixteen years after this second murder Daniel Sullivan, thinking himself to be on his deathbed, confessed to a priest what he had seen. In the event he didn’t die and the priest persuaded him to give the information before a magistrate. A warrant was issued for the arrest of Cornelius Rabach in March 1830, by which time he was nearly fifty years old. It took the best part of ten months
to apprehend him. He was a good man on the hills and his hideout, or one of them, was a cave, the mouth of which provided an extensive field of view over the approaches. Eventually he was taken in his own home while in bed with his wife; one of the constables who arrested him was the son of Maire Caoch, the murdered woman. Cornelius was sentenced to death. The principal witness for the prosecution was Daniel Sullivan, and so Mafia-like were the ramifications of the Rabachs that, to save his life, the authorities felt constrained to allow him to spend a year in protective custody.
³²

It was now growing dark. In the last of the light I went up through the soggiest of bog land past the gaping hole in the rock that had been Cornelius Rabach’s hide-out and into the high, wide marshy pastureland where Maire Caoch was strangled. It was a weird spot; a place where if you twisted your ankle you might remain for ever, or at least until someone brought up sheep or cattle to pasture in the spring. Then I went down along the side of the astonishing cleft that the Drimmin had carved for itself through the rock and splashed through the bog back to my bike. It was now quite dark and by the time I got back to Kilmakilloge at six o’clock Wanda had arrived with the van. We dined on mussels and steaks, which we both in our different ways felt we had earned, and the next morning we quitted Kilmakilloge and the O’Sullivans with some emotion, as it was unlikely that we would be passing this way again for some time.

It was nice being in a van, whirling along the shores of the Kenmare River. Kenmare itself was rather nice too, despite the rain; originally founded in 1670 by Sir William Petty as one of the English Plantations, it was laid out in its present form about
a century later by his descendant, the first Marquis of Lansdowne. Macaulay wrote of its origins:

Petty also had the equivalent of the final solution to what was known as ‘the Irish Problem’, which was to import twenty thousand English girls into Ireland and export twenty thousand Irish girls to England. In 1688 the English settlers were driven out, a new experience for English Protestants, after being besieged by a force of three thousand Catholics, part of the army raised by Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel, in support of James II. They made their last stand on a little peninsula in the river from which, after capitulating, they were allowed to embark in two vessels, each of only 30 tons, ‘packed like fish one upon the other’, eventually reaching Bristol fourteen days later, after an exceedingly rough passage. And Kenmare, like all these regions of south-west Ireland, had a fearful time during the Famine. Between 1831 and 1841 the census returns show that the population increased significantly and small tenant farmers adopted an illegal system of subdivision of land in their anxiety to provide means of subsistence for their descendants. Thus a holding which formerly supported a single family as well as providing enough cereal crops to pay the rent,
now had to support many more households, all dependent on the potato crop which failed to some extent one year in five. Thousands of people existed under these conditions in the huge demesnes of the Lansdownes whose agent, named Hickson, a kindly but some say neglectful man, allowed this practice to take place; while the British Government, although aware of these conditions, took the view that ‘necessity alone could not justify artificial interference, with the regular order of providence and society’. By February 1846 smallholders and squatters were facing starvation and were forced to eat the diseased potatoes which led to a widespread outbreak of fever. This spread to the recently completed workhouse in which there were large numbers of paupers. Work was started on a fever hospital but this was not ready until March 1847.

The medical officers’ reports, reproduced in the
Kenmare Journal
of 1982, make harrowing reading:

It was not until July that the epidemic began to subside.

Our stay in Kenmare was not a great success. Having acquired the English Sunday papers on which we were relying to keep us going as bedside reading in whatever B and B we might find ourselves in the week to come, I managed to get them thoroughly sodden while trying to jam them into our pannier bags. While I was doing this Wanda made an excursion to the Church of the Holy Cross for early Mass, only to find it still shut. Our last act was to confide our van to the care of an honest-looking fellow with much the same trepidation as one has when handing over one’s child for the first time to a boarding school.

From Kenmare we set off to encompass as much of the Ring of Kerry as we felt we could put up with, along the southern shores of the Iveragh Peninsula, by a dank, dead straight road. Eight miles along it the walls of the huge demesne of Dromore Castle began, and continued without a break, except where the road crossed a tributary of the Kenmare River, for a distance of four miles. Through a gateway flanked by a mock mediaeval gatehouse of the 1830s, at the end of an interminable processional ride flanked by moss-grown deciduous trees and enormous conifers now being cut in great swathes, stood the castle, stark and rather forbidding, on a terrace above the Kenmare River. It was a lofty two storeys high with narrow windows, heavily castellated and machicolated. Inside a turreted porch was a huge door that looked as if it was closed for ever, furnished with a modest bell-push. This we rang but there was no answer, which seemed scarcely
surprising as there was no sign of life anywhere. Nor were there any exterior signs of dilapidation: the castle simply appeared to be asleep, waiting for someone to claim it. That it was not was made abundantly clear when I rudely peered in through one of the ground floor windows into a lofty room that might have been a library, furnished with huge drapes and early Victorian furniture, and saw a paper of recent date lying on a small table. At this we rode away in a panic.

At Tahilla, on Coongar Harbour, about twelve miles out from Kenmare, the sun came out fleetingly and the black waters of the Kenmare estuary were brightened with long ribbons of gold. Hereabouts we stopped at The Rambler’s Rest, Prop. T. O’Sheehan, a pink painted cottage with a pre-war or even pre-First War Cyclist Touring Club sign in the form of a wheel in relief on the front of it. Inside, four elderly people, including Mr and Mrs O’Sheehan, had just put their Sunday lunch on a fine old cast-iron peat-burning stove. Laughing and shouting and generally full of beans, Mrs O’Sullivan, whose son lived next door, ‘which is a grand thing for us, indeed, God help us!’ produced tea and two delicious cakes, one fruit, the other with butter on. They had a TV in the kitchen but only watched the news – ‘We can’t get on with the rest of it at all.’

Still only 12¼ miles from Kenmare, but determined to reach Waterville, another twenty-five miles or so to the west, or bust – ‘The sooner we get this bloddy peninsula over the better,’ was how Wanda put it, a sentiment with which I thoroughly agreed – we left these hospitable people in what was now pouring rain. Nevertheless, at Castle Cove we made a heroic 3½-mile detour uphill to Staigue, one of the largest and finest of Ireland’s stone forts. There the road, which in warmer times would have been edged with fuchsia and bog iris, ended outside an isolated farmhouse by a babbling brook with a sign that read, ‘Staigue Fort.
Trespassers 10p. Children Free’. Beyond this the fort, with unmortared walls between ten and eighteen feet high and thirteen feet thick at the base, rose out of the fog like the abode of Cyclops. Inside, flights of steps made of jutting, regularly spaced slabs enabled the occupants to ascend the walls.